WordPress 3.5 is out!

WordPress users may have noticed the yellow banner when they login that heralds a new version of WordPress is available. The good folks from WordPress have pulled the trigger on the update named “Elvin” in honour of drummer Elvin Jones, who played with John Coltrane. The most dramatic new change you’ll notice when creating a new post is a completely redesigned method for uploading photos and creating galleries.

Apparently the team have “listened hard and given a lot of thought” to the new system for media which they have built from the ground up for 3.5. A lot of criticism focused around the difficulties of adding multiple files to a post and managing lots of media files became a bit of a chore. 3.5 changes this with a simple, drap ang drop interface allowing you to quickly and easily add meta data and reorganise your files. You can easily see files at a glance which rapidly increases your productivity. It really is a lot better and already I get the feeling that I dont know how I managed before.

Twenty Twelve, the new default theme with 3.5, features a beautiful responsive streamlined look, including the great Open Sans typeface. Its minimalist look, scales fantastically across devices and looks to be another great starting point for beginner bloggers and theme developers alike.

The WordPress team have also jumped on the “Retina” bandwagon, updating icons within the dashboard to look crisp on high DPI screens. The accessability of the dashboard has been worked on, meaning that screenreaders, touch devices, and mouseless workflows all have improved ease of use.

Finally, there are some significant changes to WordPress for site builders. Multisite installations should be signficantly faster when using switch_to_blog(). Meta queries have been added to WP_Comment_Query and WP_User_Query and the various JavaScript libraries have been updated to the latest versions.

All in all, it is another great update to WordPress and the changes to media uploading make it better to use for everyone. Do you like the new media uploader? Let me know in the comments!